While the beleaguered Tories gathers in its conference city for its annual party conference, it has plenty to consider regarding its path forward. Doubt remains if a viable path is available. These are challenging circumstances for a governing group that now has very little, if anything, fresh or distinctive to say to voters.
Things could have turned out vastly better if real advances had been made on an policy focus that resonates with people throughout the UK: Levelling up. Yet the previous administration hadn’t got the first clue on how to turn the trendy talk on levelling up into actual implementation. Over twenty-four months after the 2019 election, it discussed what the concept actually signified.
I found it bizarre, because I’d already told the Prime Minister what levelling up meant when we first spoke about it during the contest for party leader. The expression was language I created and used at the Department for Education to talk about equal opportunity. This became our departmental mantra, and its definition is unambiguous: levelling up is the method by which we attain equal access – not through reducing opportunity away from those who already have it, but rather by expanding options to those that lack them.
Another crucial education department term we used, “talent is spread evenly throughout the nation, but opportunity is not”, served as a deliberate expression, representing the dual components of a social mobility strategy. To begin with, potential shared equally but not cultivated evenly through our learning institutions. Additionally, access not provided uniformly by the private sector or our economic system. Thus, learning and employment were crucial to achieving better life chances. This constituted an mission about the social fabric of our country – supporting human talent and linking them with opportunities.
What did levelling up turn into under Johnson’s Conservatives? Regional development money overseen from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Hanging baskets and redeveloped traffic systems. A white paper was published almost thirty-six months after Johnson became leader, which saw existing policy approaches repackaged under the fresh social mobility slogan.
Therefore, a wider fairness strategy went ignored, as well as all the improvement that it could have inspired – in capital, enterprise, fiscal strategy, taxation and in place-making. And, of course, in education, including a university system that has become a scapegoat for elected officials – despite the fact that it remains the strongest driver of life improvement for young working-class people, including myself, this country has had over the past 30 years. Maybe the sole mechanism of social mobility, operating at scale.
Hope is essential for our country to succeed. For people to have aspiration, there needs to be a credible sense that effort and reward are linked; that if people aim high, they can attain. For political leadership, being able to create a feeling of hope about the tomorrow is crucial. Analysis by the academic institution at the academic establishment and others, published last month, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I introduced as education secretary – place-based approaches to boosting academic achievement – led to students in those areas being up to 18 percentage points more positive about their future than those in similar areas without these initiatives in place. The data shows: just making an authentic start on pro-social mobility policy can quickly and positively change how people perceive their prospects.
Oblivious to this, and in the midst of its successor selection process, in that period, the Conservative government closed opportunity areas down. Why should any person in those communities vote for a party that took that action? The targeted programme is a single instance of what might have become a revolutionary Tory policy platform on levelling up, but that opportunity was completely wasted. Methods such as this can generate optimism and ambition. Conversely, as the Conservatives found out, failing to deliver of fair chances is the most expensive error any leadership can make. The electorate punished the government for its ineffectiveness but, perhaps most of all, for its failed pledges on equal opportunity.
At present the baton on life chances and fair access has been transferred to a Labour government. The previous terminology has been discarded. Labour has its own public messaging of “breaking down the barriers to opportunity”. The organization that is gradually replacing the hapless incumbents, the alternative party, also has its own language – “reindustrialisation”. The terminology to talk about new opportunities in communities like the one I grew up in, in my hometown. It promises that an former economic strength can be reborn into an revitalized economy.
For voters, it must appear as a Groundhog Day-style loop. Same issue, alternative phrasing. But – as yet – no results.
If Labour and Reform UK want to avoid the similar destiny, each group should learn from the previous government’s errors on social mobility; that social mobility rhetoric is one thing, but successful delivery of improved opportunities is much harder. Our nation’s persistently low social mobility remains the central problem for our country, with young people unable to get a decent career start, those working hard in employment with little to show after the rent has been paid, and people across the country without any actual expectation their next generation will be able to do advance in life than they have.
Elected officials can talk about equal chances repeatedly. But where is the organization that has the comprehensive policy agenda on equal opportunity? I observe no such party. The first to achieve this, succeeds. Not just for their organization, but, crucially, for a whole country that has never needed equality of opportunity so desperately.
A seasoned gaming enthusiast with over a decade of experience in lottery analysis and casino reviews.
